Praise for A House, Undone

In T. Clear’s exquisite debut collection, A House, Undone, we consider what home is. From ‘a house of scant beginnings…raveling sweaters/and unpainted stairwells’ to the bodies we inhabit to ‘roaming the frozen fields…small enough to enter a honeyed hive, ’ these striking and precise poems lead us through the hallways of the temporary. Whether the ‘wife/wanted out of the couplet’ or beneath a ‘sky scrubbed-clean of mudsock grey, ’

Clear is a master of the image, the narrative arc, and the details of a story. Well-crafted, engaging, and constructed with meticulous care, A House, Undone becomes the beautiful architecture for poetry, where we live in a house of words on ‘a bed littered with leaves, /starlight for a roof.’

-Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press)

Not only is T. Clear’s A House, Undone the most downright enjoyable book of poetry I’ve read in a good while, it’s also got me seriously stirred about house and home. These poems turn personal loss and uprootedness into a highly contagious empathy for those whose dwellings we couldn’t call houses. This poet has me laughing out loud then achingly sad and outraged by quick turns through her pages. The book is so right for this American moment, but the truth is, it’s right for all history, everywhere.

-Jed Myers, author of Watching the Perseids and The Marriage of Space and Time